Fabled nuke fizzles out early

My premier prediction for 2013, presented with pomp and sanctimony, was that the new year would not bring the decommissioning of North County’s landmark nuclear plant.

“Time is short, but nuclear history is long,” I intoned in Nostradamus mode.

With eyes closed, I foretold that Southern California Edison and its main partner, SDG&E, would hang tough with regulators, running out the clock to wring more juice out of these broken-down nuke lemons.

Well, I was dead wrong — the news hit like a nuclear bomb Friday that the fat lady had sung for SONGS.

I’m disappointed in my myopic foresight, of course, but I take some comfort in my longer-term prognostication of doom for San Onofre:

“Before the end of the decade, I see the natives (some of them nude on the beach) dancing with joy, throwing bottles of emergency iodine into Dumpsters.”

So the bell has tolled a little early for the old-school model of nuclear power. (If there’s a new school, like the portable breeder-style reactors under development at General Atomics, it’s unlikely to find a campus in North County.)

The weird thing about human nature is that, like the iconic Encina power plant in Carlsbad, we’ll miss the familiar outline if and when the nuclear plant’s dismantled.

It was never so much a pure industrial site as a visually erogenous zone at the northern gateway to Camp Pendleton.

Several years ago, when I was compiling the Seven Wonders of North County, one reader offered this fanciful view:

“My nominee is the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station,” he wrote. “Specifically, it is the view that a commuter on Interstate 5 gets while up to and past Reactors 2 and 3. My experience is of seeing a giant concrete bra or bikini top arising from the shoreline where a Brobdingnagian beauty lay sunbathing below the power plant.”

In the 1988 movie “The Naked Gun,” the outline of the plant’s two reactors pops up in the background when detective Frank Drebin (the late Leslie Nielsen) is reminiscing about his ex-girlfriend.

“Everywhere I look, something reminds me of her,” he sighs.

In a variety of ways, the double-domed beauty — and its apocalyptic menace — have captured artistic imaginations.

In “Fallout,” a 2001 thriller by James Huston, an Escondido author and former Top Gun pilot, Pakistani pilots training at Miramar turn out to be Muslim terrorists who fly F-16s over San Onofre and drop bombs on the radioactive pools.

The resulting explosions kill a few hundred people and leave the area contaminated for a century. The Wasteland comes to North County.

In a “West Wing” TV episode titled “Duck and Cover,” San Onofre was renamed San Andreo, presumably after the major fault line.

Because of a faulty valve, coolant stopped flowing into the reactor’s core. President Bartlet makes a “24”-style decision to vent radiation into the air to avoid an explosion. The screenplay stoked the fear that human and/or mechanical error could force millions of panicked North County and Orange County residents onto gridlocked highways and roads.

With the tsunami-driven disaster in Japan glowing on TV screens, I was asked on the radio if plans were in place to evacuate sections of Orange County and North County if San Onofre blew.

I conceded there have been plans in place for years, but if San Onofre were to melt down, the result would evoke a compound word with “cluster” in the first position.